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Our story last week on ex-world champ Garry Kasparov coming briefly out of retirement this year got us to thinking about other players who took long “vacations” from the game only to come back and enjoy fresh success.

There are all kinds of reasons why strong players have historically taken breaks from the game — a job, a war, a medical problem, even an extended time behind bars.

Some comebacks work out well. Former world champion Emanuel Lasker, forced out of Germany and out of retirement with the rise of the Nazis, scored a brilliant third-place finish in the famous Moscow tournament of 1936. Hungarian great Geza Maroczy was one of the world’s best players when he stepped away from the game in 1908 because of work demands. Virtually inactive for the next two decades, Maroczy returned to the board to lead Hungary to the gold in the first two Chess Olympiads in 1927 and 1928.

Some comebacks aren’t so impressive: The less said about Bobby Fischer’s return to the board in 1992 for an exhibition match in Yugoslavia against old sparring partner Boris Spassky, the better.

A more heartening comeback story came out of the recent Chess.com Isle of Man Masters tournament in England, won by Norwegian world champ Magnus Carlsen.

California-born GM James Tarjan was one of the strongest U.S. players of the 1970s and 1980s, winning several international tournaments, competing regularly in U.S. championships and Olympiads, and even qualifying for the Riga interzonal tournament in the 1979 world championship cycle. But shortly after finishing third in the U.S. championship in 1984, Tarjan gave up the game to pursue a career as a librarian.

Tarjan began competing again in 2014. Now 65, he caused a sensation at the Chess.com Isle of Man Masters recently by defeating Russian former world champion Vladimir Kramnik on his way to a respectable 5-4 score in the powerful event. The Californian clinched a plus result with a nice last-round upset of another Russian ex-world champ, former women’s titleholder Alexandra Kosteniuk.

The two players engage in an absorbing positional struggle out of this English, with Tarjan as White willingly giving up his strong fianchettoed bishop to break up Black’s queenside pawns. Despite the long layoff, there is no rust in Tarjan’s tactical skills, as is evident in the game’s deciding sequence.

North Carolina GM Elshan Moradiabadi took clear first in the 4th Washington Chess Congress, held over the Columbus Day weekend at the Hilton Crystal City in Arlington. Moradiabadi defeated GM Mark Paragua and drew GM Denis Kadric in the final two rounds to finish an undefeated 6-1, a half-point clear of Kadric, GM Timur Gareyev and Virginia IM Praveen Balakrishnan. We’ll have more details next week.